Category: feminism

Addiction solutions are big business. Make that BIG Business. From Big Pharma to recovery clinics to psychiatry, from religions to self-help to metaphysics. Enormous industries have been built up to solve this always-escalating crisis of addiction.

But undeniably the biggest and most well-known solution to addiction are The 12-Step Programs, used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and a long list of other recovery programs. Anyone who has ever looked into addiction recovery has come first across a 12-step ‘solution.’

In fact, they are so ubiquitous it’s hard to find anything else. The 12-step programs have not only dominated the market for coming up on a century, the 12-step program created the recovery market, thanks to Bill Wilson and the Oxford Group.

According to the Oxford Group’s 12-Step website, Bill Wilson, Frank Buchman, and Mary Baker Eddy created the foundations for the 12-Step Program.

As fate and the WWW would have it, I know a thing or two about Mary Baker Eddy.

Her “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was selected as one of the “75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed The World,” by the Women’s National Book Association and in 1995 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was also the Founder and President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in the later years of her life.

She is considered a major founding figure in the Human Potential Movement, also called the “New Thought” faiths, the precursors of the New Age Movement, of Unity Church, that is of Oprah and The Secret fame.

Many volumes of her work are praised by religious thinkers worldwide and her Christian Science Monitor has won 7 Pulitzer Prizes and Christian Science Reading Rooms have been established around the world, all attesting to her remarkable influence during her lifetime until today.

My own family, on my mother’s side, are Christian Scientists and I attended their church as a child. What I most remember are the large block letters on the wall behind the pulpit that said “God is Love”.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Religious Science’: “The emphasis is on positive thinking, influence of circumstances through mental processes, recognition of a creative energy source and natural law (referred to as God, First Principle, Universal Intelligence, and other terms) that manifests as the physical universe, and the rejection of a good/evil duality.”

I have a copy of her most famous text where the seal on the cover reads: “Heal the Sick. Raise the Dead. Cast out Demons. Cleanse the Lepers” in fine print around a symbol of a cross and crown.

Eddy was born of an elite New Hampshire family, married 3 times, first to George Washington Glover, a well-known Mason. Christian Science and Freemasonry have maintained a symbiotic relationship to this day. Her first school of Christian Science “Mind Healing” was started in 1867.

From the Preface: “Since the author’s discovery of the might of Truth in the treatment of disease as well as of sin, her system has been fully tested and shall not been found wanting; but to reach the heights of Christian Science, man must live in obedience to its divine Principle.”

“We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory. Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the minds of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal. What God cannot do, man need not attempt. If God heals not the sick, they are no healed, for no lesser power equals the infinite All-power; but God Truth, Life, Love, does heal the sick through the prayer of the righteous.

Unfortunately for Mary Baker Eddy, despite all her efforts at righteous prayer, it was not enough, as she spent the majority of her life ill.

“She was recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body wracked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days. Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments.”

“In her later years Eddy apparently became paranoid, believing that 50,000 people were trying to kill her by projecting their evil thoughts. She wrote that if she died it would be due to malicious animal magnetism rather than from natural causes.” (wiki)

One biography claims she had an addiction to morphine. That’s another interesting parallel, considering Bill Wilson, previously mentioned of the social engineering institution known as the Oxford Group and founder of this famed 12-Step Program, used magic mushrooms to find his inner-voice of God, who then cured him of his alcoholism, and dictated his 12-step cure to addiction.

Yes, just like the New Age ‘Bible’ called ‘A Course in Miracles’, the 12-step Program was reportedly ‘channeled.’

According to the Narcotics Anonymous site, 33% of addicts get clean from their 12-Step Program. According to Dr. Lance Dodes, author of “The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science of 12-Step Programs” that figure is less than 10%.

As I skimmed through the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, the parallels to Eddy’s principles are obvious. The addict has an incurable disease over which they will remain powerless for the rest of their lives unless they adhere forever to the Principles. The Principles according to the 12-step site are:

Absolute Honesty
Absolute Purity
Absolute Unselfishness
Absolute Love

Not a tall order in the least, right?!

“NA meetings usually close with a circle of the participants, a group hug and a prayer of some sort. Prayers used to close meetings today include the “we” version of the Serenity Prayer (God, Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”); the Third Step Prayer (“Take my will and my life. Guide me in my recovery. Show me how to live.”) or the “Gratitude Prayer” (“That no addict seeking recovery need ever die . . . My Gratitude speaks when I care and when I share with others the NA way.”) (wiki)

According to Narcotics Anonymous’ “Basic Text” the problem with the addict is the: “inability to deal with life on life’s terms.” He has a terminal disease which can only be dealt with by adhering to the Program.

“We tried drugs and combinations of drugs to cope with a seemingly hostile world. We dreamed of finding a magic formula that would solve our ultimate problem—ourselves.”

In other words, addicts cannot adapt to their environment, and the problem is not the environment, the problem is the addict himself.

According the Prayer, you need the wisdom to know what you cannot change, and what you cannot change is your environment. So it would appear to me we have leagues of folks being brainwashed into adjusting to a hostile environment.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

If you can’t fit in, it’s your fault, because the society is just fine, and if you can’t see that, that’s your problem. You just don’t get it! Once you are off the drugs, and healed by mind-spirit, you’ll see how great the culture really is. If not, just buy better rose-colored glasses, perhaps.

The Basic Text is peppered with similar mantras as Eddy’s about ‘unconditional love’ and our never-ending battle against our disease and selfless demands like: “We learn that we keep what we have only by giving it away. . . No matter how much we give, there is always another addict seeking help.” Double-speak. Life-long commitment. Collectivism.

I suggest what’s happening is a transferring of addiction, from drugs to the collective and the designers of the system know this explicitly and implicitly. It’s done with a goal in mind . . .(to be continued).

The card game called Spoons is a family tradition. We played it from my earliest memory at all Shepard get-togethers, no matter the season or occasion, along with other card games, like Go-Fish and Old Maid, but also on occasion ‘board’ games, like Monopoly and Yatzee.

No cyber world back then, no cell phones or Gameboys or X-Boxes, lord only knows how we managed to plow through the boredom, with only things like cards!

Grandma told us that she was forced by Grandpa to leave the Ice Follies at age 17, where she clearly had an illustrious career in the make, in order to become a respectable wife to him, and honorable mother of his progeny. It was all pretty cool to me, because she was even in the papers, and I had my own aspirations of dancing back then.

Respectable women with families are not show-girls. This was to my grandfather an automatic given.

That’s how I heard the story, when I could first understand it, wearing my favorite t-shirt that summer of about age 11, with a billboard sprawled across my still-flat chest: Anything boys can do girls can do better.

There was this grandfather, highly concerned about the respectability of his wife, and then the one who played Spoons with the family.

These were quite large gatherings, at least compared to what I knew from my mother’s side of the then-divorced families. The game of Spoons is very simple, all the players sit in a circle, 4 cards are dealt to every player, the dealer who passes the contents of the deck to the player to one side attempts to move with a high enough speed as to confuse and disorient the one picking up the discarded cards after him. The goal is 4 of a kind. If achieved, at that moment you silently strategize alone, as there are a line of spoons in the middle of the circle, enough for every player but one. So, once you have 4 of a kind, you grab one, or, you slyly sneak one, or you wait and watch as an opportunist of sorts, or, well that’s about all the strategy I was ever able to garner from this game, besides Grandfather’s.

The strategy my grandfather played was no doubt, by any set of rules, cheating. He would collect a pile of cards next to him, feigning slowness or incompetence, and turn them over in chunks, hoping to collect pairs more quickly, then the 4s, winning the position to select the first spoon. He would play this routine regularly, but we as children would forget, it was only a time or two a year we got together, after all. But after a hand or two each time we’d remember this trick, and rail on grandpa that he was cheating, which only made him and everyone else laugh, to the end result that everyone on the floor would start using (t)his trick.

It’s a very old and simple trick after all. There’s many names for it, but in these parts they call it country dumb, that is, shrewdly playing innocent. The old tricks are the best tricks. When we take even a cursory look at the culture we can see it clearly still works.

There’s a long precedent for this sort of player, most notably from the classic Czech work, The Good Soldier Sveikby Jaroslav Hašek, certainly the predecessor to the Hogan’s Hero’s character called Schultz, celebrated for his classic line, “I know NOTHING!”

There is always a healthy level of doubt as to whether Sveik’s actions are feigned well-executed sabotage or authentic (idiotic) enthusiasm, that’s essential in the classic fool/magician archetype.

“Hasek was a comic genius . . . his message was that war is not merely cruel, unjust and obscene, but ludicrous” Sunday Times

The Good Soldier Svejk is the classic novel of the ‘little man’ fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the only weapons available to him—passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence.”

If you were a corporate or military strategist watching our family play Spoons, you might recognize this as a somewhat sophisticated case of sabotage, a sort of coup d’etat, no doubt, because when the patriarch begins to openly cheat and play dumb, you’ve just opened up the entire troupe to the same acceptable level of behavior. Cheating, it seems and many have noted, is contagious. And that’s just how it happened with our family game of Spoons as well. Aunts, uncles, cousins and parents become instant co-conspirators with youngsters of all ages plotting against them, or sometimes, on their behalf.

Is this a ‘good’ lesson to teach children, or a ‘bad’ one?

I thought of this question again when I heard this recent interview with Sarah Westall and Nick Jankel. In it they discuss a bit the importance of “trauma” in a child’s upbringing and the ways this is both under-rated and over-utilized. In my opinion they broach the cutting edge question we now face in the so-called ‘Western modernity’–obviously to bubble-wrap our children is not working, but to go back to old ways of discipline is no longer acceptable either—how can we find the most fertile middle ground?

No doubt as youth we need to be taught to not only deal with, but also to survive and then to thrive within the existing culture, but not to the point we have come now, which is blind obedience, acceptance and acquiescence, generally speaking.

It’s very easy later in life to point fingers at Grandpa and condemn or condone the unhealthy moral principles he was manifesting to his progeny at those cheating moments, especially considering he was clearly loving it.

Did we learn a valuable life lesson, by overcoming a certain level of ‘trauma’? I hope that was his unconscious agenda. Because make no mistake, to learn as a child that your grandfather willingly cheats against you, and the entire family, and then laughs about it, is not an authentic happy moment in a child’s life.

I saw him differently, call it what you want, but ultimately it’s a loss of innocence, if you can bring it to consciousness. Whether conscious or not, Grandpa taught me in that moment about the real world. Whether we are 7 or 17 when that happens, is it better it happens where one has a soft place to fall, or with random strangers in a proverbial strange land?

I don’t know. I want to stress this fact, I really don’t know. This to me is a pivotal social question. Why are we not discussing it at the dinner tables and the board rooms and the political arenas is beyond me.

Is it better to learn your 60 year old grandfather would cheat against your 6 year old nephew, and embrace that as a valuable familial tradition, and then by extension to learn that is how the world actually works?

Or, would you rather learn it when you get blindsided by crooks out to steal your successful business when you finally wake up to reality at age 47?

Could it be that Trump is brilliantly playing this archetype now?

And what about all the shades of critical social gray there might be in-between that our progeny might need to learn? Are we learning how to create a better world with these life lessons, or are we learning only how to successfully play along?

Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted to vote. She wanted to own property, and she wanted a career that was not nursing or teaching or whoring or mothering.

She was a courageous and independent woman who knew other courageous and independent women who agreed with her. They achieved the right to vote, the right to own property, and established themselves in a variety of occupations across every sector of society.

Fast forward a few generations and they became Supermoms. Mothers could do it all–have a family, have a career–just like fathers. Then the women began to complain that the housework needed to be shared, it was only fair. Machines to make the work easier and faster were invented, primarily by men, to try to satisfy these new preferences of women’s time.

Soon, women wanted to share in the glories of war along side men. They wanted to sit beside them in the boardrooms, play next to them on the golf courses, hang out in their clubs. They modeled their hierarchies, their whims, and their habits. They wanted to smoke, to drink, to travel, to carouse, to order subordinates, to manage affairs, and to control it all, just like the men.

The laws were changed to reflect ‘equality’ between the sexes. The laws were not sufficient. Women continued to get harassed by men in the workplace, groped on the bus, humiliated with lower pay for equal work, and sometimes even physically endangered.

This angered the women tremendously and they revolted. They pointed and screeched at their male bosses and their former and current colleagues and smeared their reputations publicly and had them fired and humiliated and cursed. Just as they deserved. They demanded an end to violent, colonizing, capitalizing, age-old white male patriarchy.

The women called themselves ‘happy‘ and ‘fulfilled‘ but oddly began using anti-depressants by the millions.

Still, they took their hard-earned and rightful positions at the head of the table in the boardrooms and backrooms and brothels.

But still, the men were not behaving!

Just like children, they started acting out even worse. They started secretly undermining the women in power. They started to rebel in closed groups. They choose in growing numbers not to get into relationships with women. They began to consider the women dangerous. One false move and they risked losing everything in the courts of law.

Some men turned despondent, others violent, others exceptionally determined. The women decided to drug them, it was the only way.

The drugs had some unpleasant side effects. Men’s health began to decline, but women saw this as a good thing; they were more docile and less combative that way. They began to drug the boys as well. It seemed the younger they started the more predictive became the results.

Some men were incurable it seemed, so more drastic public measures had to be taken. Those who would not stop oogling women were forced to wear special goggles that limited their peripheral vision by 50%. It was considered a great achievement and sold brilliantly in the marketplace. There were other great women’s inventions as well, like a male chastity belt, and various electric shock devices that could be used as discreetly as a tampon.

This post is dedicated to a teacher I’ve learned much from, and react to, as all diligent students should be expected to do: Stefan Molyneux. Thank you for your insights, indefatigable work which I continue to draw from, and your bullshit, which inspires this post. I am your forever scapegoat and critic, a role I hope all fans might try to navigate before they place judgment.

Oh No! Women are no longer willing to embrace their role! A direct cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire and our current civilization, according to philosopher/historian Stefan Molyneux. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh7rdCYCQ_U

The State is the enemy, women are the suckers of the State teet, that is, mothers without husbands, not the legitimate man and wife, as was meant to be by all the edicts of civilization and God himself. ‘Man and wife,’ wow, flashback! Your “being” attached to my “role,” thanks for that, already getting the old picture, the one instilled, very diligently, by my grandfather and father.

Single-motherhood is not what I’m promoting. I agree with Stefan as far as an underlying ethic he sometimes conjures which is, men count. Oh don’t I know it! I’m a so-called crazy co-dependent with Daddy issues–dysfunctional men have flocked to me for four decades now. The exception, my husband and personal hero,–but whatever, I’m a ‘feminist’ without children–that I might have a few right leanings is all that binds me to this latest new-right propaganda.

Apparently, according to the ‘new right’ those of us who did not follow the path of motherhood, and are now surely miserable in our declined state of sexual value, being no longer able to attract enough willing suitors to assuage our unquenchable egos, well I guess I’m just that tall man in China. You are misinformed, Stefan and devoted Conservative and Christian followers, and I think you are not only supporting, but espousing, as often as not, complete nonsense when it comes to a creating a functional society.

Let’s talk about abortion. What?! No, let’s talk about male promiscuity. What?! Or, heavens to Betsy, let’s imagine a woman might feel inclined to stay childless. If a man would chose this path would you be as disparaging toward his choice? When a man chooses not to rise to his “social-sexual” obligations, are you as harsh on him as you are on her? Because what I see is, not at all. He gets limitless porn in your world, I get legs crossed or, shame on me for ruining Western civilization. I’m sure the fact that men had a growing predilection for young boys during that period had nothing to do with women’s growing dissatisfaction in their marriages.

You are in reaction. Because ‘he’ is browbeaten by the Left, you do always make apologies for his transgressions and side, always, with him. You never give the woman the benefit of the doubt you give the man. That’s reaction to Leftist bias, not a response to authentic imbalance or injustice. Not philosophy, right? Jumping on the easy old social programming bandwagon. Because of course, you’re going to need it when your daughter hits puberty in this dysfunctional world, and you are met with a serious contender.

Handy Hubby repeats, no honest enterprise ever got a union that was not deserved. The union provides protection against the unfair master as the power of promiscuity provides to the unfair sexual union. I bare the cost of our union, as a woman, more than you. If you want me to stay faithful, make my day.

How you love to leave out the co-creative dynamic. The system you are engendering is still, as in centuries past, the feminine in service to the masculine. How’s that been working out for us so far?

I’m not saying the exaltation of the opposite as we see now pushed so savagely by the Left and the ‘New Age’ movement is the answer, not at all!

But I don’t see your deviation saving us at all from the dichotomous meme. Embrace Trump, cause women get paid better, or just cause he’s the opposite, or just cause that means we “win” and wow. The master becomes more shallow and blinded than his student. It’s as simple as that. Well then otherwise, embrace Hillary, that’s your choice. So, I’m on the verge of vomit. The double-bind. Welcome to democracy.

Seriously, I don’t see how you’re helping that much, regression is so distasteful.

You’ve lost your objectivity, Stefan Molyneux, or I was terribly mistaken you ever had any. If you’re serious about your mission, you’ll make some attempt to get independently-minded women on your side. All those ‘Leave it to Beaver Moms’ you hope to find ready to fight for liberty, not your best option. You are missing your market entirely. They are too busy raising your perfect kids to have the time to fight the real battle and they certainly don’t have the power or left-over energy to get you to see reason through your nonsense.

Embrace those gender roles nonetheless, right into complete myopic social dysfunction, because that’s what Trump wants. Bonding with narcissistic dysfunction will surely help your cause.

Oh good grief, am I being sarcastic and passive-aggressive? Good God I hope so, that means I’ve learned from my masters.